Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician who lived from 1977 to 2017 and was a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Born and raised in Tehran, she studied at Sharif University of Technology, graduating in 1999, and earned her doctorate at Harvard University in 2004 under the supervision of Curtis T. McMullen. Her research concerned hyperbolic geometry, dynamical systems, complex analysis and topology, and it centred on the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, including the so-called magic wand theorem proved with Alex Eskin and later Amir Mohammadi. In 2014 she became the first woman and the first Iranian citizen to receive the Fields Medal. She died of breast cancer at the age of forty, and initiatives to encourage the participation of women in mathematics were founded in her memory.